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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

• mrkramer 3y ago
  Rich are getting richer but financial meltdowns happen all the time and then we are all again at the year zero and we shuffle the cards and start playing like nothing happened. In another words, richness does not last forever.
• 2devnull 3y ago
  I’m not extremely wealthy so can’t spend 20 pounds on this but I imagine I would agree with the moral argument for limiting wealth. But the details make the whole discussion seem like an absurd waste of intellect. Please, just name the people who you want to “wealth limit” and explain how you will go about it. Specifically address the obvious problem: wealth gets distributed across families and other groups in such a way as to make it impossible to even count let alone try to limit. If it could be done, it would have been done. Digital currency shouldn’t be the impetus to relearn governance mistakes of the past. Once you understand the problem is not a should or shouldn’t problem, but a how is it possible to problem you quickly realize the answer is more individual freedom.
• MalcolmBaird 3y ago
  [dead]
• smsm42 3y ago
  Explain to me please - how millionaire is "extreme wealth"? Median household income in the US is about 75K. If you retire at 65 and plan to live to 85 (some live longer), you already need over a million to sustain that. That's not counting medical and care costs, and anything you want to live to your kids or charity, and anything you may spend on some fun activities like travel in those 20+ years. So how somebody who has $1M at retirement is "extremely wealthy" and "nobody deserves" it? Surely, I wouldn't call such a person poor, but "extreme" to the point that it implies some kind of deep wrongness that warrants confiscation and other extreme measures? That sounds like complete nonsense. How does it make sense? I know there's social security, and other welfare payments, and various adjustments, but I don't see how these calculations would be so mismatched as to warrant the moniker of "extreme wealth".
• snapplebobapple 3y ago
  I am not paying 20£ to read am article and i dont see an archive link, so i am flying blind but here goes: the fundamental problem with all these types of articles and so i assume also with this one is as follows: govermment is not better than private wealth, it is just a different group of assholes interfering in my life. Thr problem with all of them is the interference (abuse of market power in economic terms) so lets stop crying about people being successful amd instead target market power abuse. This means severely limiting government but also empowering government to much more easily break up market power abusing companies (i.e most of the s&p 500 plus a bunch of large private companies).
• throwaway81523 3y ago
  Bah, "Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected."
• golemotron 3y ago
  > The answer to so many of the problems posed by neoliberal capitalism - and the opportunity for a vastly better world - lies in placing a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can accumulate. Because nobody deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you. It won't cure envy. Nearly everyone alive today is a "millionaire" compared to people living a few generations ago in terms of standard of living. Absolute standard of living continues to grow but that is invisible if you compare yourself to your peers.
  • dbingham 3y ago
    It doesn't have to. The point isn't a perfect society, the point is to prevent resource hoarding and the accumulation of totalitarian power. When we allow wealth to accumulate we are also allowing power to accumulate.
    • FredPret 3y ago
      When we allow the state to dictate wealth ceilings, we hand it absolute power.
      • dbingham 3y ago
        The state is democratic, not absolute. When the state implements policies like this it is acting as a democratic expression of the community's will. We as a community are saying "We're not going to allow individuals within our community to accumulate undo influence over it."
        • golemotron 3y ago
          The power of that community is absolute.
          • jdiff 3y ago
            As it should always be. Not that it is currently, not with these pesky billionaires.
• kuratkull 3y ago
  I'm wondering if people understand that almost all the pleasures/comforts in modern life were created by people who wouldn't exist in this system.
  • pxmpxm 3y ago
    Can't wait to replace starlink with a new take on back yard furnaces. This is just a re-marketing of the same socialist ideas that have empirically failed every time. People with positive inability to create wealth self-appoint to control the people that have demonstrable ability to create wealth. Doing so is the only way for the former to end up in control of wealth, again because they are incapable of generating it themselves. It's a bit amusing that no one about the commie paradox - the group of people that profess the greatest ability to central plan and redistribute wealth is entirely devoid of individuals with a track record of creating wealth. A reasonable person would expect a strong correlation there.
  • jdiff 3y ago
    This system doesn't eliminate people. It eliminates the pointless and harmful hoarding of wealth.
    • eej71 3y ago
      Your usage of the word "hoarding" implies a Scrooge McDuck view of wealth where its just stashed away in some vault - never put to use. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.
      • jdiff 3y ago
        My mental image is one of unelected, untouchable oligarchs taking actions that they're accountable to nobody for. That's far worse than Scrooge McDuck.
        • dingnuts 3y ago
          So you're imagining President Xi and the House of Saud, I take it? As long as you aren't imagining someone like Elon Musk who is certainly accountable to his debtors and shareholders and Boards, then this can be viewed as a realistic take. If you're talking about people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates who have giant wealth because of their investments in businesses, then arguing that they should have that wealth taken away would literally take money out of the coffers of businesses that are currently using that money for things like payroll. The GP is correct -- these people are not sitting around on a vault of gold like McDuck. Their money is in the economy, doing stuff. That's what investments are. That's why investors exist, and why they get a cut of the profit for taking a risk and lending their money to industry.
• drkevorkian 3y ago
  I agree with the premise that "nobody deserves to be a millionaire" (although maybe with inflation we should say deca-millionaire), but a hard cap seems like a crude tool with many potential downsides. A UBI would be a better tool for raising living standards, and a progressive wealth tax would be a better guard against hereditary fortunes, without removing the incentives for high earners to continue working.
  • dbingham 3y ago
    You don't need incentives for high earners to continue working. 1) We can afford for them to stop working. Really, it's okay. People can just chill. We're more than efficient enough for it. 2) People don't need monetary incentives to work. Most of us get bored just chilling. We want to feel useful. We need community. We need something to engage our brains. The vast majority of people, left to their own devices, will find some sort of work to do.
    • fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
      Do you really think people will go to medical school for 4 years because they are "bored of chilling?"
      • lostlogin 3y ago
        Do you think people go just for the money? There are a lot of healthcare systems where the wages aren’t that impressive and the hours are very long. There are benefits beyond money. Job satisfaction, societal standing, caring about people, etc etc.
        • fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
          I think most people go for the money. If you were to walk into any undergrad bio 101 class and announce: "sorry guys, but you can only make 80k a year," 95% of the students would leave immediately.
• FredPret 3y ago
  We should place a hard cap on political ambitions like these. These utopians will be the end of us with their ridiculous schemes involving always what other people should do.
  • avgcorrection 3y ago
    Is political ambition measured in pages published?
  • jdiff 3y ago
    But the billionaire utopians and their ridiculous schemes, those are totally cool and will save humanity.
    • FredPret 3y ago
      When you say "billionaire utopian" a couple of people spring to mind: - Bezos - Musk - et al These can be removed by market power, even during their own lifetimes. I bet you anything that in a generation or two, their fortune will be mostly dissipated. The vast majority of rich people are much less rich than these two; their money will dissipate even quicker. Most of them made their fortunes in their own lifetimes; many will lose it in the same timeframe. They have to keep performing economically (work + investment) to keep their money. But: I will also bet you anything that in a generation or two, the state will be larger than it is today, and will have assigned to itself more rights and prerogatives, and will somehow have inserted itself into our daily lives in an even more intimate way, whether anybody likes it or not.
  • tehjoker 3y ago
    I don't understand why we celebrate the (false) utopian ambitions of the rich who very much make decisions for other people - coercively too bc we need to eat (and they also use lawsuits, media, govt, and assassinations if you cross them).
  • lostlogin 3y ago
    What other ideas should we ban?
• dbingham 3y ago
  Adding this to my reading list. I've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million. Because that's the point at which you have enough wealth to live a comfortably middle class lifestyle for the rest of your life, still pass down a substantial chunk to your children, and never have to earn another cent. I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker owned economy - in which businesses are democratic institutions governed by the people who do the work involved. But either of these changes on their own would do _substantial_ good. Going to make a note to read this book!
  • keeganpoppen 3y ago
    yeah, $15.1 million is just obviously, blatantly too much
  • lostlogin 3y ago
    > Adding this to my reading list. I've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million. Wouldn’t a tax system that steeply ramps up, includes property and tends to it’s loopholes (family trusts, property etc) achieve most of this?
    • yellowapple 3y ago
      A land value tax alone would address the vast majority of this, considering that virtually all wealth derives from land access/ownership.
      • AgentOrange1234 3y ago
        Is that still true? I’m probably in a software bubble, but like: none of FAANG have any real land holdings, for instance?
        • yellowapple 3y ago
          Their servers exist somewhere, and while it's called The Cloud™, that ain't literal ;) Datacenters, offices, warehouses, factories... these all sit on top of land. Even a fully-remote company running off Raspberry Pis in someone's closet still requires some quantity of land on which the employees' homes and that closet full of Raspberry Pis sit. Even if the companies themselves don't own that land directly, somebody does.
• tehjoker 3y ago
  What about having a rationally planned democratic society instead of people chasing dollars at the expense of everything? No rich people, just democratic processes accessible to all incl. in production.
  • eej71 3y ago
    I think you'd have to be very clear about how this is different than the previous attempts at such "rationally planned democratic societies".
    • lostlogin 3y ago
      The ‘central planning committee’ and ‘the 5 year plan’ certainly have some baggage attached.
      • littlestymaar 3y ago
        Yup. Years of propaganda convinced most people that these are exclusive features of Communist dictatorship, when they actually existed in post war capitalist societies as well. Fun historical fact: the father of the European Union, Jean Monnet, was the head of the “central planning committee” in France in 1950 (and he really wasn't a commie).
    • MeImCounting 3y ago
      I am not in favor of a planned economy, but I do believe our society faces a significant issue with certain individuals hoarding money and resources. If we are to employ a group that uses violence to enforce the will of the majority under the threat of violence, then we should at least utilize this forceful approach to prevent some individuals from becoming entrenched in power and wealth. As they exist now, mechanisms of state violence exist primarily to suppress the uneducated and poor of our society. We should not allow people to hoard wealth. I dont know where that cutoff is or how it should be decided. Maybe increasingly aggressive taxes with no loopholes? It does need to happen
      • 3y ago
• quirkot 3y ago
  Hell yeah. You accumulate $100m (or whatever the limit is) and we throw a parade for you. You get an award and your name on a plaque. You won capitalism! and you're not allowed to make another cent
  • megaman821 3y ago
    To what end? Innovative companies are literally creating money that did not exist before. Do you think there is a fixed pie of money?
    • FredPret 3y ago
      Real, per capita economic growth only really started with the Industrial Revolution - when companies started literally making money. But the mindset of many is still caught up in the uber-conservative (from an economic point of view) mindset dating to the middle ages that wealth is like land: it's just always there, and if you want more, you have to get it from someone else buy buying or seizing.
    • imtringued 3y ago
      If you mean the net worth of money, which is zero, yes it is fixed. For one person to have a dollar, another needs to be in debt. Also, for one person to make profit, they need to spend more than they earn, which inherently means the rest of the economy is in debt. Now you might say the profit will be spent, but then it isn't profit anymore. Oh and if you want to talk about the real economy, entropy always rises, so no free lunch there either. When the economy grows, all that happens is that the human domain expands and humanity exerts more authority over the processes that occur within its domain. This by definition results in a loss of agency of the non human domain.
    • kelseyfrog 3y ago
      The Federal Reserve creates money. This is Econ 101. There is a fixed pie of money it's called the M2. Again, Econ 101. Perhaps you meant "value"? Be careful though, if you start differentiating between money and value, you arrive at communism. This is literally the first and last chapters of Capital vol 1.
• lostlogin 3y ago
  What happened here? > ‘The best case I've read for putting an upper limit on the accumulation of wealth’ Richard WilkinsonNo-one deserves to be a millionaire. Mobile Safari.
  • pphysch 3y ago
    Misconfigured MySQL database on site backend, nothing to do with your client.
• pizzafeelsright 3y ago
  You'll always have the poor (by system, choice, situation, intention) among you.
  • jimbokun 3y ago
    Because however much overall conditions improve, the people at the bottom of the new system will still be considered poor.
• sudden_dystopia 3y ago
  Nobody should even be a millionaire it says. A small house in California is a million dollars ffs. The irony of charging 20 pounds for this is palpable.
  • macintux 3y ago
    If no one was a millionaire, a small house in California wouldn't cost that much. (I'm not defending the thesis, but it needs a stronger argument against than that.)
    • anon291 3y ago
      > If no one was a millionaire, a small house in California wouldn't cost that much. It depends how this is structured. If the limit is you can't save, this actually puts pressure on housing prices as people are looking at ways to 'productively' spend the money.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
    Yeah, the blurb does literally say, "No-one deserves to be a millionaire." That threshold is the wrong choice, at least with prices where they are today. If you do the math, millionaire is just about where your assets start to balance your liabilities. By liabilities, I mean the cost of a modest and frugal life. In that fuller accounting, the millionaire is merely the freedman, the person who has climbed out of the debt-hole into which almost all of us are born. Let's do the math. 1. A millennial can get a decent Gold PPO plan on the health insurance marketplace, including basic dental and vision, for about $500/month. Anything below Gold merely coinsures ER visits and does not actually protect against catastrophic loss. 2. If you move to a cheap city and shop around, you can rent a decent one-bedroom apartment for $1,300/month. Even in a cheaper city, it will not be new and it will not be downtown. 3. Now consider utilities. Say $30 for a cheap cell phone plan, $50 for Internet, $100 for electricity (if you have electric heat), $20 for water. That's $200/month total 4. Allow another $80/week for groceries and $100/month very-occasional minor luxuries (get lunch out, get Starbucks). 5. Finally, let's say you really hit the jackpot with apartment and job location and are able to get by with a monthly bus pass costing $50/month. We're at $2,230/month, or $26,760/yr. Now assume you can get a 3% real yield. To finance your $26,760 annual costs, you need $892k invested -- nearly $900k. This analysis has assumed unusually cheap rent and lifestyle. Add in car payments for a Corolla, or a less optimistic rent, and you're quickly at $1M needed. Yet I'm still talking about living frugally. I'm also assuming no childcare expenses. So, for those reasons, and because $1M is a nice round number, I simply summarize that $1M is actually zero. And it's only zero in a cheap place. If you're in California with only $1M you're still in the hole. ... Yes, there is a problem. The natural world was expropriated from us before we were born, we were born into a system we didn't choose, and we must work off an indenture we never signed up for. So I agree with much of the spirit of what the author says. But, quantitatively, if everything else about the current system remains as it is and we are only talking about where the cap is, then $1M is too low. Because $1M is merely where assets begin to balance a single person's liabilities.
• clircle 3y ago
  So, what's the best argument in the book?
• boppo1 3y ago
  How about we just don’t empower a central planning body to make monetary decisions that devalue wages & salaries while inflating asset prices? QE & LIRP have literally been “rich get richer, poor get poorer: the policy”. People educated enough in finance to follow the effect tend to be in the asset-holding camp so there is less complaint. I’m not advocating high rates as good for the poor; I’m championing shaping the yield curve with a market mechanism. It might be too late for that to be anything other than disastrous though, after years of addiction to funny money.
  • MR4D 3y ago
    > How about we just don’t empower a central planning body to make monetary decisions… For people that might argue with this statement, I’d highly suggest reading the book The Panic of 1907. And if you’re wondering I’m bringing up a book about 1907 instead of 1929, then that should lead you to go read the book.
    • newzisforsukas 3y ago
      Ah yes, 1907 a time of great monetary equity
      • throwawaymaths 3y ago
        Whatever you think of 1907, the US went from a highly unequal society (an entire sector of citizens not even owning themselves) followed by being a failed state after an an insane civil war that decimated the population... To world power with a much MORE equal society, in five decades with no centralized financial institution
        • Supermancho 3y ago
          > To world power with a much MORE equal society, This statement relies heavily on how one might want to measure an equal society.
          • 3y ago
• readthenotes1 3y ago
  A US politician said no one deserved to be a millionaire until he sold a book and became a multimillionaire. Now, he says no one deserves to be a billionaire. We should also say no one should be devastatingly handsome or pretty, outstandingly intelligent, excessively lucky, or extraordinarily persuasive. Or tall. Or athletic. Or motivated. Or powerful (which is rather more related to limiting someone else's money).
  • FredPret 3y ago
    What's the deal with Michael Phelps hogging all those medals? Or with Taylor Swift hogging the charts? I sing in the shower - I want a record deal too! On a smaller scale, these damn farmers are making too much money. I'm sure I can grow an orange just as well - they should be made to hand over part of their farms to me. Same goes for all the software startups and those coders hogging the SaaS startups!
• frabjoused 3y ago
  No NBA player may score more than 100 points per season. After reaching this cap they may only pass the ball.
  • jdiff 3y ago
    You score points. No one has ever earned a billion dollars.
    • MightyBuzzard 3y ago
      [dead]
    • nh23423fefe 3y ago
      Only if you lie about the meaning of "earn"
    • missedthecue 3y ago
      Who did JK Rowling steal her billion from?
      • ebb_earl_co 3y ago
        *Whom did I suppose some people would say all of the workers who manufactured the glue and binding for the books and harvest the trees that constitute the books, and the truck drivers and ship captains who sent her books around the world. The causality is beyond me, but if I could steel man someone on that side of the argument, I think it’s that
        • missedthecue 3y ago
          If she made most of her money from ebooks would she be stealing it from Michael Hart, the inventor of .epub file format? Or what? At some point we have to admit this is ridiculous.
  • leothecool 3y ago
    We should make a wealth shot clock. Nobody is allowed to hold an asset for more than a few seconds.
• theragra 3y ago
  I wonder if this book have a solution how to motivate people working more and creating companies if it does not make you rich. Certainly a lot of people among most driven would work less or emigrate. If I can't earn more, I would work that's most joyful and relaxed. So, no banking or any other demanding job where there are a lot of rules.
  • jszymborski 3y ago
    I think most Americans would be plenty motivated by the prospect of home ownership, let alone being a multi-millionaire. I don't spend much time worrying about what we'll do without billionaires working towards their next billion.
• cosmojg 3y ago
  Productive wealth is a good thing. It's what made our current society possible. Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil. I strongly prefer a society which permits the existence of Jeff Bezos over one which does not. Of course, more strongly than that, I prefer a society which taxes inelastic goods and negative externalities and returns that wealth to the public over one which does not.
  • RGamma 3y ago
    "Funny" things will happen, when the labor factor is removed from the three factors of production by AGI. ~Jeff can finally have the planet all for himself.
    • cosmojg 3y ago
      Indeed, but only insofar as he can accumulate military power. Relevantly, incompletely taxed land ownership is a means of renting such power from the state, hence my gesturing toward a land value tax and universal basic income.
  • smsm42 3y ago
    > the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil. What do you mean by "hoarding"? I don't think any living person owns enough land, gold or oil to represent even tiny percentage of the overall market. The whole Russia, for comparison, owns 12% of oil market. So if you personally owned all the oil in Russia (by any measure an achievement far beyond the wildest dreams even of the richest Russian oligarchs, who still have to share among many others) you'd still be just one of the players. So I don't think those mystical "hoarders" really are as scary as you seem to think they are.
    • cosmojg 3y ago
      Just because hoarding is popular doesn't mean it hurts society any less. We all pay for the inefficiencies it produces, whether or not it's distributed. (Granted, distributed hoarding is better than centralized hoarding as demonstrated by the likes of De Beers et al.)
• medo-bear 3y ago
  I always wonder, what would happen if all objects of desire that come from systematic manufactured want suddenly become borring
  • RGamma 3y ago
    Nature will throw a party.
  • rockemsockem 3y ago
    Do you have some examples of what those objects of desire might be?
    • medo-bear 3y ago
      Any product whose life span is usually much shorter than what it should be. A classic example from technology is "the new" iPhone. A classic example from clothing is "the new" Zara collection. A far bigger problem is that this manufactured want drives so much of our economy (employment mainly) while actually being ecologically unsustainable
• rfwhyte 3y ago
  The problem I have with extreme, gratuitous wealth, and the inequality that creates it, is that it is fundamentally anti-democratic. It is well known by anyone with a pulse that money = political power, which means those with the most money, have the most political power, and given how just how much wealth so few people in the world have now, an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the population of most democratic countries have essentially entirely captured the political apparatuses of the countries in which they reside. Meaning the interests of the majority of the people in most countries are no longer being represented by their elected officials, instead the people being elected solely represent the interest of wealthy elites who can afford to make huge political "Donations" and pay lobbyist's salaries. I've said it before and I'll say it again, but one of the most effective changes we could make in the world is to get money out of politics, as its the only real way democracy can be put back in the hands of the people.
  • chrisweekly 3y ago
    Well said. I'm reminded of Professor Lawrence Lessig (of "Creative Commons" fame), whose staunch belief is that in the U.S., in order to make progress on any of the big-ticket problems we all face, we have to Fix Congress First. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_Congress https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_Congress Reducing the influence of $ in politics is at the heart of the matter.
  • missedthecue 3y ago
    The relationship between money and political power is vastly overestimated. In the US, the mega billionaires are hated in Washington by left and right alike. Bloomberg spent a fortune on his own campaign and didn't win a single state in the primaries. Even if you look abroad, the billionaires are not the ones with political power. In places like Russia and China, billionaires have to suck up to the politicians or they risk getting disappeared, disbarred, or thrown from windows.
• yedava 3y ago
  Extreme wealth is a symptom of an underlying problem - inhumane exploitation. People can get that rich because the economic system says that it is perfectly acceptable for a class of people to pee in bottles/diapers in order to maximize profits. The solution for this doesn't have to target the rich explicitly. We can strengthen labor laws; update anti-monopoly laws. Make human dignity the central argument. This will circumvent knee jerk reactions like "I work hard, I deserve to be rich". The question to ask is how are you, as an owner of capital, treating your labor? Like do they get to have a life after work? Have dignity at work? Do you use your wealth to circumvent democratic will and weaken labor protections? The answers to those questions should determine whether you deserve your wealth or not.
  • lebean 3y ago
    [dead]
  • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Very well put thank you for writing it out this way
  • missedthecue 3y ago
    Wealth isn't zero-sum. Your earnings aren't extracted at a cost to someone else.
    • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      Measurably untrue for equity ownership which is a prerequisite for “wealth” in that you need to have undifferentiated ownership of assets that increase in value. Equity in a for profit corporation is fixed to the current round of funding with theoretical increases at certain intervals. These increases very specifically reduce the existing size of the “wedge of the pie” - aka takes from and redistributes ownership in the new pie size. This is called “Dilution” and we’re just told it’s how the game works. Note that the theoretical expectation is that the overall “value” stays the same despite literally being called “less than.” However, we know that those valuations are not rooted in any type of mathematical or otherwise natural function like let’s say the gravitational constant, that is unchanged and unmoved by exogenous circumstances, therefore the fact of splitting the pie Redistributes functional ownership, irrespective of what the value theoretically is. you’ll also note that the specific function of private equity is to ensure the retention and growth of equity ownership over all goals. So specific to the mechanisms within the commerce system, specifically ownership, they are not only functionally but mathematically zero-sum.
• stevenalowe 3y ago
  Interesting how "extra" wealth is always someone else's problem. "No-one deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you." Stopped reading right there. Hubris overload.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• anon291 3y ago
  > But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. This is exactly why I don't really care how rich Elon, Gates, Bezos, Buffett are. If they have money, great... If they don't... oh well. Doesn't change my life. It's also the reason why you shouldn't care and why this book is likely a load of crock.
• eterevsky 3y ago
  The description misleads already in the second paragraph: "We all notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow." This is just not true: the share and absolute number of poor people has been decreasing for a long time. See https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief. Socialist/communist countries that tried to limit the ability of people to get rich made all of their citizens poor.
• ThomPete 3y ago
  The ability to create extreme wealth in a democratic capitalist society is an indicator of the economic freedom. It is the wealth that gives us the freedom to invest in new knowledge creation to solve problems. The more wealth the more opportunities, especially when they are in the hands of someone who have proven again and again their ability to create value to society. Elon Musk is of course the obvious example but not the only one, Jeff Bezos, Larry and Sergey and we could go on. These people are excellent capital allocators. The alternative to extreme wealth is extreme poverty and Almost no one in western society gets to keep their wealth for more than 3 generations because other have the freedom to outcompete them. Everyone over time gets richer. The alternative to that is dictatorships where there is no economic freedom, capitalist ownership and the way to make money is governed by the ruler. Anyone making a case against extreme wealth in a society that is fairly free is spreading extremely bad ideas that if they become popular leads to revolutions. In modern society the issue is not big corporations or extreme wealth, it's institutional capture by politicians and that entire system.
  • deepsquirrelnet 3y ago
    To generalize this idea further, it seems to me that at some point, concentration of wealth compromises the freedom of markets — whether by political influence or legal means. And that’s what needs to be focused on.
• Leary 3y ago
  How about a hard cap on inheritance instead.
  • pizzafeelsright 3y ago
    Theft is how to ensure hostile accumulation.
• max_ 3y ago
  We should have regulations to limit the price of such books and how much royalties the author is receiving to make the books accessible and not make his income deviate too far from the rest of his fellow authors that don't make any money.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• gwbas1c 3y ago
  I've always believed that ever higher degrees of wealth come with an obligation to manage people in better and better ways. Otherwise, wealth should be taxed so that "idle rich" end up having to live like the upper-middle-class. IE: If you get very wealthy because you start a company, and manage your company in a way to improve other peoples' lives, that's a great thing. (Now, does Elon Musk deserve 50+ billion dollars? I'll just handwave and say that I think he could still live the same kind of life, and make a better contribution to society, with a fraction of that money.) But, if Elon's kids all inherit many billions each, they either have to manage it in a way that improves other peoples' lives, or they need to be taxed back to the upper middle class.
  • jimbokun 3y ago
    > I'll just handwave and say that I think he could still live the same kind of life, and make a better contribution to society, with a fraction of that money. Elon's an interesting case because he very passionately and sincerely spends his money on what he believes are the most pressing problems facing humanity. Almost all of his wealth is invested towards those goals. He's an asshole and treats people terribly. But he is very consistent about investing in what he believes to be most important. (source: Isaacson's biography)
    • gwbas1c 3y ago
      Part of the handwaving is that reinvesting profits into other businesses is something I agree in. For example, compare how Musk invests his money and runs his companies to how the Beatles invested their money and ran "Apple Core." The Beatles were horrible business operators and were essentially being taxed back to the upper middle class. I always chuckle when I listen to "Taxman."
• helpcatscary 3y ago
  There’s a lot of comments in here straw manning a book that I would guess very few have actually read. I don’t know if it’s a good argument or not but I’m sure the author is intelligent enough to have considered incentives and the case of central planning in the USSR and it’s not dunking on the author to just blindly bring these cases up as if they disqualify their whole argument. If this three paragraph summary of a 300 page book is so enraging then there’s maybe some deep seated biases to confront first.
  • arp242 3y ago
    Approximately no one commenting here has read the book; it's only been out for a day, and while I'm a big fan of "actually read the fucking article before commenting", expecting people to purchase and read an entire book before commenting is a bit much. IMHO this is a bad submission; not because the book or the premise of it is good or bad, but because all most of us can do is discus the title and (very) brief premise.
    • helpcatscary 3y ago
      Yeah that’s a fair point. It would be much more valuable to at least wait until someone in the world has had a chance to read the book and post a more detailed review of it. As it stands right now there’s nothing to talk about now other than the boogeymen we invent in our mind of the people who have the opposite stance on this than us. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if someone involved with marketing the book posted this knowing that it would provoke some kind of response from the community.
• tunesmith 3y ago
  I think it would be great for someone or some think tank to devise a very well thought out publicized plan of how an ultra-rich person could efficiently redistribute their wealth to do a lot of good. Seems like most of what people recommend now is just "give it to charity!" but that's not exactly well-vetted advice. Or like the snarky advice downthread to just write a check to the Treasury, that's not what I'm talking about. Something constructive and efficient.
  • fouronnes3 3y ago
    Isn't the thorough, extensive and open-source research that GiveWell does exactly what you're asking for? The amount of evidence you'd have to give to argue against "give everything following GiveWell's recommendation" as the objective and data-driven best option is extremely high.
    • tunesmith 3y ago
      I think the one conceptual point I'd make against this is that GiveWell seems oriented toward the person that wants to give a few hundred or few thousand here and there. Note that in their top offerings, there's no indication of how much money would be enough to solve the problem, or too much. For instance, malaria nets are about managing an existing problem rather than solving it. A billionaire could target their money differently, like funding research or setting up labs to target their money toward solving pressing problems rather than managing them. I don't really know much about the big problems, like maybe they are all already at the point of being at the edge of unknown unknowns, where you just have to throw money at them to do exploratory research. But I'd imagine there are others that are along the lines of "we know how to solve this, it just needs funding", funding beyond what could be crowd-sourced or from your average charitable giver, and I'd like to see those opportunities in some sort of ordered list.
• deleted 3y ago
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• crotchfire 3y ago
  Will you cap the wealth of corporations too? Because if not, people with insatiable appetites will simply seek control of those corporations rather than direct control of piles of money. Personally I'm an advocate of the exact opposite of what seems to be proposed here: controls on corporate size rather than individual wealth. Living cells don't grow without bounds; at a certain point they get too big and are forced to divide. Simply imposing a tax on corporate size (not a limit) would accomplish this. Industries where massive size is simply unavoidable (e.g. passenger airplane manufacturing) would simply pay the tax; any economic distortions can be nulled out by reducing the industry's VAT rate in proportion to average size-tax paid by that industry. In all other industries smaller competitors would have the persistent advantage of lower tax costs, allowing them to eventually undermine the bloated colossuses.
  • gmac 3y ago
    Yes, I think you could make the case that entities of any sort — corporations or individuals alike — should be allowed to exceed the threshold only if they’re under some kind of democratic control. And obviously that’s not a get-out that individuals can use.
    • crotchfire 3y ago
      The Commanding Heights, eh? I think this has been tried already, unfortunately.
  • samatman 3y ago
    This supposes that there's some naturally-right size for a corporation to be, without bothering to argue why that might be. I don't see why that would be true, and abundant evidence that both large and small corporations add value to the world.
    • crotchfire 3y ago
      This supposes that there's some naturally-right size for a corporation to be No, in fact, it doesn't. Please re-read the comment you're replying to. There is no cutoff, limit, or threshhold. It doesn't prescribe a naturally-right size any more than a graduated income tax "prescribes a naturally-right amount of income".
• germandiago 3y ago
  I admit I did not read the book but I must say the concept seems wrong from the root. A person with a lot of wealth must invest his wealth in some way that it will generate jobs or invest the money in other business. That is also a benefit for the rest. So that thing about "we cannot see" I do not think it is such. I mean, it is easier to see poverty on poorer people BUT the wealth invested is also what makes people have incomes. And you need people investing and managing wealth because someone needs to pay bills and multi-year investments or risk capital. It does not need to be a single person, but a group of wealthier people are usually more inclined to risk wealth than average. I think this role is also necessary in societies.
• Invictus0 3y ago
  A million dollars doesn't even buy a small house where I live.
• the_optimist 3y ago
  If there’s just one nonsense idea that humanity absolutely will not let go of, it’s this one: In anything other than the short term, you can really make yourself better off by making other people worse off. It’s a feudalist mentality that’s totally obsolete in free markets. Loads of people just continue buying this snake oil by the tankload, making themselves unhappy and unfortunate. Not a way forward.
• jongjong 3y ago
  At this stage, I'd vote for any proposal which equalizes wealth. Limiting wealth, UBI... The most interesting proposal I've heard recently basically suggested that instead of governments selling bonds (to the central bank and to the markets) when it creates new currency for public spending, it should essentially just give the newly created bonds to citizens since it's the people's money anyway that it's loaning out... It would have to split them equally among all citizens.
• tim333 3y ago
  To do anything practical I think you'd need to distinguish between wealth as in owning a company and as in money you spend on things for yourself like houses and cars. You could make a case for limiting the second one. The trouble with restricting owning a company type wealth is what do you do with cases like Google or Facebook where some people build a better bit of software and because people like using it the company becomes valuable? Do you just ban successful ventures? Or confiscate them? When that's been tried under communism it hasn't worked very well.
• dools 3y ago
  My policy proposal for reducing concentration of power is: 1) maximum revenue per employee at privately held companies, eg. $1m 2) maximum ownership of a company by a single person or entity of, say, 5% What this means is that when you hit a good stride with a business and solve the entrepreneurial problem, you have to go public and sell your stake in it. Everyone gets a rewarding pay day, but there is greater accountability and earlier on and more even distribution of the gains.
• benreesman 3y ago
  Extreme wealth is not per se a problem, or not a terribly pressing one. The rounds to always that extreme personal and corporate wealth becomes fungible into induced market failure, is deployed exactly that way, leading to you guessed it, even more extreme personal and corporate wealth is a huge problem. It’s going to cook us even faster than carbon emissions in fact on present course. I can see why a middling academic like Friedman, or an embittered Eastern Bloc emigre like Rand, or generations of ambitious apparatchiks and politicos have seen fit to endorse some nonsense, zero-evidence economic theories to the contrary. As for why a community like HN that both knows better and stands to lose thereby endorses this manure? I don’t have any better explanation than Clements on temporarily impoverished millionaires.
• SubiculumCode 3y ago
  I often wonder how it would work out if instead inheritance, all wealth at death was deposited into the $USA$ fund, then in aggregate got redistributed as universal income (or start-up fund) to all citizens (in equal amounts), save for some moderate amount. Complications sure re property, but would it squash or enhance the economy?
• oneoff123 3y ago
  One could look at things from a different perspective: All That money, like all debt, represents goods and services we collectively owe to those people. They expect to one day buy things from us. If we want to honor that agrement we should at least attempt to not make it worse.